The present subject matter relates generally to systems and methods for an online identification to a physical address exchange platform.
In today's society, people are identified by a plethora of identifiers including their name, social security number, bank account number, residential address, password, birth date, and email address, among others. Because many identifiers are confidential information, most people prefer to keep their information private. However, individuals are continually asked to share their identifiers with third parties, for example, by providing a mailing address to a third party or by providing a billing address when purchasing an item online. However, it may be unsafe to share identifiers, such as a physical address, with unknown individuals. Moreover, the more confidential information an individual discloses, the more likely the person will be subjected to privacy challenges.
During a typical transaction, a sender selects an item from a retailer's website to send to a receiver. During checkout, the sender must input his or her name, the billing address of the buyer, gift options, the name of the receiver, the address of the receiver, and the phone number of the receiver. Based on the large amount of required information, many senders decide not to complete the purchase owing to either not having the time to complete the checkout process or because the sender may not have all of the receiver's personal information. For example, the sender may not have the physical address of the recipient and, perhaps, does not feel comfortable asking for such personal information from the receiver. In addition, physical addresses change often such that it is difficult for senders to track the changes in address in order to determine the most current address to use as the mailing address.
From a recipient's perspective, providing his or her residential address is not safe. In addition, updating a change of address is often a time consuming and laborious process. Typically, a recipient must update their address information in each organization. For example, a recipient must update their address with the post office, department of motor vehicle, internal revenue service, energy company, magazine subscriptions, place of employment, among a multitude of others.
In addition, conventional systems do not take into account the recipient's preference in shipping location. For example, a recipient may want certain packages sent from friends to be mailed to his or her home address, where as the recipient may want to gifts from colleagues to be mailed to his or her work address.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods directed to an address system that does not jeopardize an individual's privacy information while taking into account a recipient's preferences.